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Chattanooga: Lovell Field observation deck remembered
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| Tom Snow | |
If Morty Lloyd has his way, area children will one day be able to visit a park near the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport, watch aircraft take off and land, and be inspired to consider flying careers and hobbies themselves.
“At this point, it’s a dream,” said the nondenominational pastor and board member of the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport Authority. “But the thought behind it is that an untold number of pilots have said, ‘You know, my inspiration came about due to the observation deck (atop the city’s former Lovell Field terminal).’”
Mr. Lloyd, 44, said he grew up at Lovell Field, often flying with his father, the late Mort Lloyd, a television news anchor and private pilot who was killed in an airplane crash in 1974; and then watching his mother, former U.S. Rep. Marilyn Lloyd, as she took off for Washington, D.C., on Sundays for congressional sessions and returned to Chattanooga on Fridays.
“The observation deck was a great place for families and young kids, especially those bitten by the aviation bug,” he said.
The airport’s last observation deck, a fenced area on top of the 1964 terminal building, was closed due to security concerns in the late 1980s. The new airport terminal, opened in 1992, does not include an observation deck.
However, according to Chattanooga Flyers Club member Ernest Igou, 91, observation decks at the airport date back at least 60 years.
The club, he said, once had 200 members and a lot of clout at the airport. With that clout, he said, members were allowed to build and pay for a large glassed meeting room atop a restaurant next to the main airport building.
Although the Flyers Club used the room, members also made it available to visiting politicians, the Federal Aviation Administration (for administering test) and the general public.
The public, at that time, preferred watching friends and loved ones take off and land from ground level outside the terminal behind a wrought iron fence, he said.
“Seldom if ever did I see people go up there,” Mr. Igou said.
Later, he said, the airport razed the restaurant building, promising the Chattanooga Flyers Club permanent residency at the airport (they still have a room today), and enlarged a small observation platform on the second story of the terminal.
Staff file photo
A crowd gathers on Lovell Field’s observation deck, center, to watch the arrival of one of the first jets in Chattanooga.
The $2.7 million 1964 airport renovation provided the observation platform many Chattanoogans remember today.
Tom Snow, 58, said his father would take the family to the airport on Sundays after church in the 1950s and 1960s.
“We would spend quite a while there,” he said. “I was intrigued with the fact a private citizen could fly his own airplane.”
Mr. Snow said his mother also used to take him to the airport to watch his father return home when he had to fly — usually on a two-propeller commercial DC-3 — for his job.
“It was the seed of a dream,” he said.
Today, Mr. Snow is a private pilot who has been flying since he was 30. In addition, his company, T.J. Snow Co., uses two single-engine Cessna Skylanes in which engineers fly to make service calls.
Earlier this week, for instance, one pilot made services calls in Louisville, Ky., Springfield, Tenn., and Seward, Neb., he said.
“Flying small aircraft has enabled us to greatly expand the reach of T. J. Snow Co.,” Mr. Snow said. “Just try that in a car or on the airlines.”
Mr. Lloyd said it is possible even with new security regulations to create an aviation-themed park. He said he has researched airports from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Van Nuys, Calif., and said the busy general aviation Peachtree DeKalb Airport in metro Atlanta has such a park.
He has talked to airport president and chief executive officer Mike Landguth about potential sites, but he said “nothing has been nailed down.”
Such a park, Mr. Lloyd said, would allow a vista for visitors to watch airplanes take off and land, would have playground equipment and might even have a sound system in which voices from the control tower and from pilots may be heard.
In 2001, he said, he was approached at an air show convention in Las Vegas by a member of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. The pilot, he said, was originally from Dalton and mentioned how his attendance at an air show with the Thunderbirds at the Chattanooga airport in 1986 had inspired him to try out for the elite squadron.
“You never know whose life is being affected,” Mr. Lloyd said.
Mr. Snow agreed.
“As someone who dreamed about flying from an early age,” he said, “I cannot overemphasize how important it was for me to get a chance to regularly watch airplanes take off and land from the observation deck on the roof of the old terminal building.”
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This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Chattanooga Publishing Company, Inc.
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